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Let Catholic social teaching shape your new year

Our faith is too important to let slip.

We all know the routine once Christmas enters the rearview mirror. Maybe we packed on a few holiday party pounds. Maybe we spent too much on gifts under the tree. No matter the ailment, there’s a new year just around the corner. “This is the year I keep my resolutions!” we proclaim—always in good faith to start. “No, really . . . this is it! I’m going to get healthy! I’m going to save money!”

Catholics need to fight for national parks

Catholics need to fight for Native American’s sacred sites.

Every summer, my family and I spend a couple of weeks driving across the country to visit destinations we have never been to before. Last July, our annual road trip included three of Utah’s five beautiful national parks—Arches, Canyonlands, and Zion.

The southern half of Utah is a remarkable work of art, and no two national parks are alike. Even though driving across Utah to visit the three national parks took up the bulk of our trip, I wanted to see everything at once.

Shireen Korkzan is a Midwest-based reporter who joined the Catholic Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in 2011. An Indianapolis native, she has a master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University and a bachelor’s degree in music performance from Valparaiso University. Korkzan has written articles for the National Catholic Reporter as a Bertelsen editorial intern and for the State News as a cops & courts reporter. Korkzan has also worked as an intern with the Target 8 investigative reporting team at WOOD TV8 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Follow her on Twitter @smkrm5

To survive, cities need to become sustainable together

Many have talked about the 2017 floods in light of climate change, but the resulting humanitarian crises suggest another reason to rethink urban development.

The images of human suffering before nature’s impassive course were riveting, if heartbreaking. After days of torrential rains, thousands were in flight from their homes seeking safety on higher ground. Where was this historic flooding taking place? In late August you had your choice of storm crises to pick from across the globe.

The creation stories you probably haven’t heard

It’s time for the church to listen to indigenous people.

For Shantha Ready Alonso, the fight for environmental justice goes back to the 15th century, to the doctrine of discovery, a series of papal bulls that started with Pope Nicholas V. These documents, for which the Vatican has yet to apologize or repudiate, gave European nations the pope’s blessing to colonize non-Christian lands and kill native peoples.

Engineering a path of discipleship

At the heart of one engineer’s discernment is stewardship: How do we maintain our quality of life through respectful and responsible means?

Growing up, two inclinations molded the majority of my activities: a passion for interacting with the natural world and an interest in building things. As a kid I spent my free time outside, endlessly nagged my dad to take me fishing, and assembled whatever I could, making castles with paper and tape as a kindergartner and building a bike from scratch as a teen.

Jake Schueller is a civil engineer building renewable energy projects around North America.

Hulu’s new show portrays a world where the bodies of women are used and discarded, exploited much like the land and water Gilead’s people have destroyed.

What if you woke up one morning and everything and everyone you knew and loved was gone? What if it happened slowly over time? In Hulu’s new series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the 1986 book by Margaret Atwood, this is the situation in which protagonist Offred (Elizabeth Moss) finds herself. She goes to sleep in the United States of America and wakes up in the Republic of Gilead, an oppressive regime based on the perversion of scripture and patriarchy taken to the extreme.

Sarah Margaret Babbs writes on peace and justice, parent loss, and hope in suffering on her blog Fumbling Toward Grace. She lives in Carmel, Indiana with her husband and three children.

The parish garden that brings faith down to earth

A nonprofit organization helps churches put down roots—both in the soil and the community.

Every week, hands plunge into the earth at St. Benedict the African East Catholic Church in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Around five raised-bed plots and six container gardens church volunteers, police and fire department baseball league players, and various community members pull weeds, plant flowers, and get to know one another.

The “Garden of Eatin’ ” grows tomatoes, kale, peppers, eggplant, and salad greens. The congregation shares the crops and donates the excess to the local food pantry, says Susan Rashad, founder of the parish’s garden club.

Wyatt Massey is a social justice journalist based in New York. He loves to run, has strong feelings about superheroes, and enjoys wandering.

Earth is a sacred text

The holiness of the Eucharist is alive in the soil with which we work.

The smell of horses and leather filled the air as I made the last harness adjustments, stepped behind the team of willing Belgians, and drove them to the walking plow that stood at the head of the garden. Trace chains clinked against the doubletree as I hooked the plow. I joined the lines in a plowman’s knot and ducked into the loop they formed, situating the smooth leather around my back. With the loop running under my left arm, across my back and around my right shoulder, I was able to control the team while I took hold of the plow handles, worn smooth with repeated use.

Robert L. Ernst is the founder of Plowshares Farm Center for Education and Spirituality in Buffalo, Kentucky.

An oil and gas rush or last gasp?

Who really benefits from oil and natural gas production? Are those benefits worth the risks?

The United States is experiencing an unprecedented oil and natural gas rush, but this rush is less about finding untapped reserves of these fossil fuels and more about getting those commodities to market before any more of its leaky bottom falls out. Overproduction because of fracking has contributed to a collapse in the price of a barrel of oil, which hit a low of $26 in February.

The company using marine trash to inspire change

Caring for creation one skateboard at a time.

A search online for sustainable skateboards, sunglasses, or bamboo utensil sets reveals Bureo—the company—in the top results. All their lines of gear are fun, extremely well-engineered, eco-friendly, and, again, fun. Exploring the site and the company’s young history rewards the curious with an inspirational narrative of an American success story played out on a global stage.